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In films from 1941, the hauntingly beautiful American actress Elizabeth Russell seemed predestined for psychological horror films. After an unforgettable one-scene appearance as one of the title characters in producer Val Lewton's Cat People, Russell became a fixture of the Lewton unit at RKO until 1946. Her best performance during this period was as the spiteful daughter of genially crazy old recluse Julia Dean in Curse of the Cat People (1944). Outside of her work for Lewton, Elizabeth Russell was seen as Bela Lugosi's wife in The Corpse Vanishes (1942) who, despite being dead for 25 years, gives Lugosi quite a tongue-lashing whenever she sees him and is the model for the portrait of the ghostly Mary Meredith in the Paramount chiller The Uninvited (1944).